How to Enable Snapping in Inkscape

In this article I’ll show you how to enable snapping in Inkscape.

Quick Answer: Click the Snapping Icon in the Upper Right Corner

To enable snapping in Inkscape, click the Snapping icon (looks like a magnet) in the upper right corner of the window. (The area where this icon is located is technically called the “Commands Bar,” as I discuss in-depth in my article on The Inkscape Layout).

You’ll know snapping is enabled because the icon will be highlighted in blue once active.

Note you can also toggle snapping on or off by using the “%” shortcut key, or in other words hit shift+5 on your keyboard.

To disable snapping, click the Snapping icon once again (it will no longer be highlighted).

How to Enable Custom Snapping with Simple Snapping Dialog

There may be cases where you want specific types of snapping enabled in Inkscape. For example, you may find having everything snap to everything else on your canvas may be a bit annoying, and may prevent you from placing objects in a particular place on your page.

To solve this problem, Inkscape has built-in advanced snapping options and features.

Next to the Snapping icon is a small arrow. When you click this arrow, it will open a small dialog with some additional snapping features. This dialog is technically known as the Simple Snapping dialog, though I just call it the Snapping dialog.

For one, if you have snapping currently enabled, you’ll see a checked “Enable Snapping” checkbox. To disable all snapping, simply uncheck this box.

Below this checkbox you’ll see three additional icons: Bounding Boxes, Nodes, and Alignment. If the icon next to these items is highlighted (usually blue by default), it means that snapping feature is enabled.

Snap to Bounding Boxes

The Bounding Boxes option, when active, enables the snapping of objects to the bounding boxes of other objects, guides, page boundaries, etc.

“Bounding Boxes” simply means the square or rectangle outline that goes around the object contained in that box. In the above example, you can see the dotted outline surrounding both the star and circle objects. When dragging one of these objects close to the other, their bounding boxes will “snap” to each other.

Snap to Nodes

When the Nodes option is enabled, you can snap individual nodes (such as those that are along a curve created with the Pen tool) to objects, guides, page boundaries, etc.

To select a node, simply grab the Node tool from the toolbox and click on a curve. Click on any of the nodes that appears (you can shift+click to select multiple nodes), then drag the nodes. If you have other elements on your page, your nodes will snap to those elements (they are snapping to the guide in the above example).

Snap to Alignment (Smart Guides)

Alignment snapping enables Inkscape’s Smart Guides feature. Smart Guides are on-page guides that help you quickly align objects to one-another in real-time.

With this snapping feature enabled, if you grab an object with the Selector tool and click and drag that object, you’ll see red guides on your page that indicate various objects or page areas that your object is aligning to.

This is a really handy feature for quickly aligning objects directly on your canvas, giving you real-time feedback to communicate how your selected object is aligning to other on-page elements.

Advanced Mode

At the bottom of the Snapping dialog is a link labeled “Advanced Mode.” Clicking this link will expand the dialog to reveal even more snapping options, allowing the user to have more granular control over what elements will be affected by snapping.

There are many different options in Advanced Mode (too many to cover inside the scope of this article). What I’ll mention about this area is that the various advanced snapping features are organized into categories, and you can uncheck the parent item (red arrow in the above image) for any of the categories to disable all snapping options for that category. On the other hand, you can check/uncheck individual child elements (green arrow) inside a snapping category to toggle specific snapping features.

To return to the simpler Snapping dialog, click the “Reset to simple snapping mode” link at the bottom of the Advanced Mode dialog.